Re: Hotbackup without a standby?

On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, howardjr_at_www.com wrote:

> Presumably you have off-box, if not off-site, backups of your
> datafiles and controlfiles?
>
> A quick bit of shell scripting (or batch file editing) and you
> can easily arrange for off-box (or off-site) backups of your
> archivelogs.

> Put the two together, and you have a very recoverable database,
> regardless of what happens to the host box. If disaster
> strikes, you've probably lost the current redo... but even with
> Standby Database that's probably true, since there's no archive
> of the current log.

Yes. I was having an argument with a guy, and he was adamant that archive logging without a standby database was useless. I said one still has backed up the database to the last committed transaction. His point was more that without a standby, all of the data was useless. I was sort of, yeah, I guess it would be best to have standby, but having saved your database up until the last committed transaction was the more important accomplishment. Getting the instance up and running again was much less the problem.

> Archivelogs are the only thing standing between you and major
> data loss. They are, in that respect, extremely useful. I'd
> hazard a guess and say that 90+% of all production databases
> run in archivelog mode. Of those, maybe 20% at best have
> standby's.

I just wanted to make sure I wasn't crazy. I was discussing this with a guy who was interviewing me, and I basically backed down at the end. The recruitment agency said I won't be called back for a second interview and I bet its because I failed that question, in his eyes. Hell, it wasn't even for a DBA job, but instead a PL/SQL developer and DB design job.

Just as a rant, he also started the interview focusing on the fact that I had been 9+ years in consulting and therefore didn't know what it was like to work in a "fulltime" position. After that nice little introduction, I almost told him that I didn't think we would be making any kind of connection and lets not waste each other's time.

-- 
Galen Boyer
It seems to me, I remember every single thing I know.